two
women holding hands in public
by Douglas Messerli
Jack Deerson, David
Novik, and Barbara Peeters (screenplay), Barbara Peeters and Jack Deerson
(directors) The Dark Side of Tomorrow aka Just the Two of Us /
1970, 1975
Whenever I approach a
film of the 1970s that I have not previously seen, particularly LGBTQ works, I
can escape a slight shift of my shoulders and an inner cringe. I know, clearly,
that there were a number of great films in that decade, some of them like the
works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Luchino Visconti, Derek Jarman, and
Salvatore Samperi being LGBTQ cinematic works of great visual beauty and
narrative complexity.
But I must admit the vast majority of the
films of the decade, even some that I hold dearly, seem to consist of
washed-out color works, often with tones of blue, yellow, brown, and orange
upon which a story lumbers through its fames with the grace and excitement of a
rhinoceros trapped in a dime store stocked with Halloween masks. The plaid male
bellbottoms, clumsily coifed piles of female hair, and the drugged-out stares
of so many leading characters supposedly engaged in wild and loose parties that
seem absolutely spiritless and boring, leave me reeling. What happened to the
beautifully toned black-and-white and stunning color forays into a complex and
sophisticated presentation of figures in a landscape that we encountered in the
works of the earlier Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, François
Truffaut, Michelangelo Antonioni (although mostly heterosexual in his case),
Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Roman Polanski, Jacques Demy,
Joseph Losey, Jacques Rivette, and so very many others? Whatever happened to
the international sophistication of the previous decade, particularly with
regard to gay and lesbian cinema?
And then there are the sexploitation
films of that decade, most often lesbian in nature, which seemed to have
discovered their dialogue in the pages of a potboiler romance by a writer who
pens at least three books a day, and reuses of the plots of soap operas that
the major studios has long tossed into the trash. I already reviewed just such
a work from the cusp of the visually dreary decade, Russel Vincent’s That
Tender Touch (1969). Although generally listed as a 1975 film, Barbara
Peeters’ and Jacques “Jack” Deerson’s Just the Two of Us was first
released in 1970 as The Dark Side of Tomorrow (which remains the film’s
theme song) before being re-released under its current title in 1975, and the
two have a great deal in common besides now being distributed by Wolfe Video.
Both films concern two suburban Los
Angeles women who for a period of time are joyfully engaged in a lesbian
relationship until a man comes along, attracting one of them who breaks up with
the other—in That Tender Touch permanently, while the secondary
character in Just of the Two of Us intends that but can’t go through
with it. And both are conceived and structured as a popular male fantasies
underlain by a soap-opera plot that was surely perceived as an attraction to
any possible female/lesbian audience, which given the dearth of lesbian cinema
available in those days, was apparently consisted of a fairly large number of
interested women. As David Alexander Nahmod summarizes the situation in his
review of the two films in the Bay Area Reporter:
These films were
generally marketed to a straight male crowd,
who could ogle the
T&A content without entering a "forbidden"
adult theatre. But the
lesbian-themed films in this genre had
a second, closeted
audience.
Some 35 years ago,
there was no L Word for women to tune
into. In 1970, if a
lesbian wanted to see lesbian love portrayed
onscreen, these films
were all that was offered. So these
"dykesploitation" films, as they're sometimes called, quietly
built a cult following
among women. They can hardly be called
classics, but they're
part of our cinematic history. If you look
past the sometimes corny
dialogue and clumsy acting, you find
serious themes that
lesbians could relate to: their longing to
connect and be loved by
each other.
But surely, even then—that same year
Howard and I had just publicly announced our gay relationship and were involved
in the post Stonewall gay liberation effects on our college campus—most
lesbians (and I must remind the reviewer above, lesbians were very much at the
heart of the post-Stonewall revolutions, and there was a very active lesbian
community long before that time; see my review from 1950 of the Mona’s San
Francisco lesbian bar Candle Light) must
have found much of these work’s phallos-centric perspectives fairly offensive.
Jan Oxenberg’s witty lesbian satires were filmed during this same period.
And even at the height of the sapphic
cinematic romances between the two sets of women, their lives seem to consist
of a rather dreary sequence of events that include mostly hiking, horseback
riding, walking along the beach, playing miniature golf, and taking each other
to lunch. In both the films the female couples seem to find great pleasure in
riding the carousel on the Santa Monica Pier. And, finally, both films also
contain parties that I would have left, even back in 1970, before I passed the
vestibule. In Peeters’ and Deerson’s film the party, attended by wealthy gay
men and lesbians, consists mostly of the attendees staring at one another—most
of whom are described by the host Mona Klein (Elizabeth Knowles) as wealthy
celebrities in fashion and film—when they’re not engaged with two
male-in-tights’ crotches or a scantily-clad female performer who together make
up the trio of the Queen Mary Dancers. Maybe you need several glasses of the
hooch and dope the party-goers are consuming to experience all the fun.
Hollywood directors and even independent filmmakers have never been very
successful in representing swinging parties. Shortly before this Blake Edwards
had devoted an entire film, The Party (1968), just to satirize the
subject; but even with Peter Sellers’ Indian character’s repetitions of “Hi
Tex” and “Birdee nam nam,” he couldn’t arouse much humor.
Yet Barbara Peeters, a feminist who went
on the direct several important lesbian movies and Jack Deerson, who just a
year after this film was the cinematographer for Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane
Blacktop do, ultimately, turn this film in a more interesting direction. Of
the two films, the commentators agree, Just the Two of Us has aged
better.
If the film begins as the story of two
bored suburban housewives whose military husbands pretty much ignore them,
running off for several weeks at a time to engage in war games in Arizona, the
tale quickly turns to something else when the lunching friends—having found
what they consider a bohemian-like café in a canyon—encounter a couple of good
looking women holding hands and obviously demonstrating their love for one
another.
Both Denise Bentley (Elizabeth Plumb) and
Adria Madsen (Alisa Courtney) are shocked by their openness and even ask the
waiter (Vince Romano) if he’s going to throw them out or even call the police.
His acceptance of the event, however, changes their perception, and Denise, in
particular, even recalls young women friends in college who, although more
circumspect about it, were so inclined. But it still effects the friends, and
as they go their car to leave, they encounter the women again sitting in their
car, intensely kissing.
Other films of the day would have perhaps
taken the situation no further, and, when the two women later decide to “try
out” same gender sex, presented merely as an act of curiosity, the film appears
to assert to the film’s male audience that such things simply happen to women
when their “natural” sexual needs get ignored. When the girls recount their
experience at a card party with two other neighbor women, their friend quickly reveal
themselves true homophobes, suggesting not only that it is against nature but
faulting both the waiter and their friends for not calling the police, fearful
of the influence of such behavior on their own daughters.
And, it does appear, at least in Adria’s
case that the sexual experiences they soon begin to explore with one another is
all a kind of game, although one in which both seem very much pleasantly
engaged.
But the film quickly reveals that for
Denise, at least, it is not simply a whim, but in fact a sexual urge that she
has been hiding from herself for a long while, which helps to explain her own
unhappiness in her marriage. And it is her gradual coming to terms with that
identity that is at the heart of the film.
Contrarily, Adria treats it, at least at
first, as a momentary predilection, something simply to replace what she’s
missing with her husband away for such long periods of time. She clearly loves
Denise as a friend, but quickly moves to what might be described as the next
stage of sexual infidelity by flirting with two men the women meet on an
adventure at a Los Angeles pier. The males, Jim Jeffers (John Aprea) and Casey
(Marland Proctor), have just caught a fish, and in standard chauvinistic
manner, invite the women to cook it for them. If Denise wants nothing to do
with the situation, Adria is only too happy to take them up on invitation, she
and Jim getting on quite nicely while Denise gives Casey the cold shoulder.
Finally forced by Denise after dinner to
take her home, Adria leaves her phone number for Jim on the bathroom mirror
penned by her lipstick.
Within no time Jim and Adria have
developed a relationship, leaving Denise on her own to contemplate her
unexplained feelings and her obvious hurt for having been so quickly displaced
in what she thought was a loving relationship.
If the film is still not sophisticated
enough to imagine how to fully express her suffering except through heavy bouts
of drinking, reading pulp fictions, and long strolls on the beach—on one such
walk encountering a beachside combo playing to hippies, the London Dri—we do
finally realize just how invested in a new sexual identification she is when
she meets up with the early lesbian couple who invite her out to the party I
spoke of above.
If nothing much is happening at the
party, in the back pool room to which Mona finally takes the curious Denise,
something rather exciting does finally occur as the predatory lesbian, after
drugging the neophyte, attempts to have sex with her upon her pool table. When
Denise suddenly jumps up, dresses, and runs off, we know it is not the sex
itself that appalls her, but whom she is
having it with and
where. What Denise discovers in that moment is that she is not only a lesbian
but is still very much in love with Adria and worried about her situation.
And indeed, Adria is very much in danger.
The man with whom she believes she has fallen in love, Jim, is using her and
another woman simultaneously for advancement in his acting career. His previous
lover has just gotten him an audition for a role, so he must reward her with
sex once again. And he is depending on Adria for a new suit and other financial
support.
She, however, is planning a future with
Jim, and given Denise’s response, suggesting that she still seems him as a
hustler, determines to cut off their friendship entirely. What Adria also
doesn’t know is that her husband David returned home without her knowledge, and
quickly discovers that she is having an affair given that she has paid a
parking ticket with her “husband,” obviously Jim pretending to be David.
Her husband quietly sits in the house as
Adria and Jim return, she talking about the sex they’re about to enjoy. David
suddenly looms up before them, slugging Jim and also, in the process, striking
his wife in the face several times before leaving the couple alone to face the
consequences, Jim also perceiving that with a broken nose and swollen jaw he
will have no career if he remains with Adria. He tells her what she has
previously told Denise, that there is no longer any room in his life for their
relationship.
Now, having been abused by both the men
with whom she once loved, Adria meets up forlornly but obviously chastised,
with Denise, the plot suggesting that from now on it will be “just the two of
them.”
Yet, a deeper reading of this work, which
Plumb’s fairly convincing acting seems to require, is that while Denise has
come to truly know herself and knows that she is still deeply love Adria, it is
not all certain whether Adria has recognized herself as or if she even truly is
a lesbian. Whether or not the relationship between the two women will last is
never answered. But the film has revealed Denise’s coming out, and we now
recognize her as the stronger and more mature of the two women for that fact.
It appears that Adria will always be a woman seeking refuge and identification
in another being.
This film, accordingly, is by far one of
the more complex explorations of lesbian sexuality, outside of Pandora’s Box
(1929), The Killing of Sister George (1968), and The Bitter Tears of
Petra van Kant (1972) that we have thus far encountered in LGBTQ works of
cinema.
Los Angeles, July 26,
2021
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (July 2001).
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